Living in Babylon with Darwin, Marx,
Freud, and Deloria
GEORGE J. JENNINGS
Department of Anthropology
Geneva College
Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania 15010

From: JASA 35September 1983): 137-144.

Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming upon
you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver
are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You
have hoarded wealth in the last days. Look! The wages you failed to pay the workmen
who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have
reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived on earth in luxury and
self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter. You have
condemned and murdered innocent men, who were opposing you (James 5:1-6 NIV).

Preparing To Meet Our Neighbors In Babylon

It is common knowledge that marked disparities exist in the
contemporary world peoples that are suggested by such
categories as the "Third" and "Fourth" worlds, the "North"
and "South" worlds, the "Developed" and "Undeveloped"
worlds, or more bluntly, the "Have" and "Have-not" worlds.
20% of the world (North America, Western Europe and
Japan) produces and consumes 65% of the world's goods and
services.

Francis Schaeffer was asked once by college students if he
considered it necessary to learn about the thinking and
writing of non-Christians. His response emphasized that (1)
though marked by human depravity that affects thinking,
unregenerate scholars still bear to some degree the "image of
God" with capability for discovery and insights; (2) though
subject to limitations from a sinful nature, many non-evangelical scholars have discovered many facts and offered
interpretations of aid to evangelical thought; and (3) though
some Christians have sought to probe causes of human
depravity operating through social and cultural circumstances of mankind, often evangelical Christians have been
"part of the problem rather than part of the solution" to the
various ills among mankind.

Reflecting upon the view that non-Christians have something to say to us who are evangelical, I began to both think
and speak about this during a leadership role in the Middle
East Christian Outreach's annual orientation seminar in
Cyprus. Later while in Damascus, I was once more confronted with glaring examples of economic disparities
between the "haves" and the "have-nots" of the Middle East.
My mind began to take me back over the years when my wife
and I have suffered traumas stemming from encounters with
shocking impoverishment in the Third and Fourth Worlds.
Perhaps several Christmas Day (the Christian world's "rite of
intensification" for affirming giving and sharing presumably
to emulate God's gift of His Son) experiences might epitomize
something of our traumas:

(1) A Christmas Day in a Vietnam refugee camp in Thailand near the
border of Cambodia where among indescribable conditions the Vietnam
girls were being raped with impunity by the Thai guards who hate the
Vietnamese.

(2) A Christmas Day among the impoverished Kor'ku tribal people of
central India where the annual income per capita in 1980 was $140, and
where one sleeps in rooms plastered by cow dung under mosquito netting
to keep out rats from the bed.

(3) Christmas Days in Tehran and Beirut in the throes of hostilities and
violence that appear almost daily in the news media.

From what has caused profound anguish to me, I have
returned to the sensate America via Hawaii. The unabashed
luxury and excesses immediately encountered has been "affluence shock" indeed, even to the degree that I have asserted
to my wife that I do not think that I can ever, with conscience
before my Lord and Savior, spend a holiday in what many
American Christians deem to be just short of paradise!
Further confirmation of our excesses came some time ago
when I entertained a member of the Palestine Liberation
Organization (PLO) at Geneva's Alexander Hall for an evening meal. The slight-built youth in his mid-twenties
(attending another school here in the States) expressed amazement at both the amount and variety of food served to
Geneva students and the waste to be observed on that one
occasion.

With such experiences in mind during my recent stay in
the Middle East, I found myself reading the closing chapters
of Revelation, including the dramatic and catastrophic
destruction of Babylon as God's judgment. This infamous
city, among other things, seems to be described as the
ultimate prostitute who is pursued and sustained by the
world's political and economic systems. Prostitution, in my
opinion, can be considered as the awful exploitation of what is
basic to human life; namely, procreation and maintenance.
What the Apostle Paul affirms to be a basic principle for
Christian interaction and relationship that bears upon the
prostitution concept is his words to the Thessalonians:

For this is the will of God, your sanctification; that you abstain from
immorality; that each one of you know how to take a wife for himself in
holiness and bonor, not in the passion of lust like heathen who do not
know God; that no man transgress, and
wrong
his brother
in
this matter,
because the Lord is an avenger in all these things
...
(I Thessalonians
4:3-6 RSV).

I maintain that this fundamental prostitution idea
addressed to Christians in the husband-wife dyadic relationship is what the inspired Apostle John views as mankind's
rapacious exploitation of basic human needs; or, rather, the
rape of the majority of mankind by an affluent minority.
Even worse, the wealthy and wasteful minority has been the
Christendom of Western Civilization (the one significant
exception is non-Christian Japan). And this rapacious treatment is not at an end, for neo-colonialism, or economic
imperialism, among the Third and Fourth Worlds is increasing the disparity between the "haves" and the "have-nots!"

It becomes obvious, then, that I envision the Apostle John's
Babylon as mostly formed and sustained by the Western
"Christian" political and economic systems that continue to
monopolize the goods and services of our contemporary
world. As a matter of fact, the discussions about "nationalism" and "modernization" held in the luxurious hotelssymbols par excellence of the prostitution-in the Third and
Fourth Worlds to aid in "development" of "underdeveloped"
peoples have frequently been the means for greater acts of
rape. As a youth I was indoctrinated by evangelical Christians
in the view that the Apostle John's Babylon is the Roman
Catholic Church. Such an interpretation is to me now quite
untenable.

As industrialization and colonialism accompanied exploration by Christendom in the Western world, especially in the
19tb century, scholars questioned the growing exploitation
that supported the rising affluence in the West. The traditional analyses included those by the Church whose leaders
failed to employ alert and cross-cultural perspectives to assess
gross inequalities supported by
The Protestant Ethic and the
Spirit of Capitalism
(Weber). In fact most Christian theologians, with startling myopia, stimulated thinking that reacted
to expanding prostitution of the world's peoples by either
confirming the rape or by withdrawing from the battlefield
to establish a sharp dichotomy between emerging science and conventional Christian orthodoxy.

There is pathos in the widely accepted view held by the
Church of the 19th century that Western civilization represented the apogee of social and cultural evolution (although
the term itself frequently was anathema to some Christians).
This sophisticated ethnocentrism among Western Christian
thinkers of that day may, in a certain sense, be suggested by
the use and definitions held for "savage" and "pagan." One
need not delve into European history of the last few centuries
to discover the savagery in Christendom that climaxed in
World Wars I and TV It is obvious to the most casual observer
that the "savages" and "pagans" of non-Christian lands can
learn new and more ingenious techniques of war and torture
from the cultural zenith in Western Christendom!

With the pervasive absence of concern and compassion
(some exceptions of course) for the rapacious exploitation by "civilized" Christendom of those "out there," disillusioned
scholars withdrew increasingly from theological interpretations. There emerged in the European scholarly circles those
who sought solutions related to empirical evidences forthcoming in youthful science seeking for the "truth;" the quest
not yet the "end," but the "means," science sought solutions
to human problems for it was not then committed to serving
technology per se (Ellul).

Hence, among those not identified with, in many cases
clearly opposed to, the Church's approach to mounting
inequities in the world, I have selected quite arbitrarily four
thinkers who seem to me to represent four basic positions and
fields of learning that the haughty Church neglected. Of
course, any person acquainted with the development of
Western thought could easily challenge my selections and
substitute four others with sound argument. Nevertheless, I
insist that my four "neighbors" in our Babylon brought to
influential attention, even though denied then and now by
evangelical Christians, basic underlying assumptions that
have guided the mental set of Western peoples, including
devout Christians. The basic assumptions include (1) competition, (2) conflict, (3) anxiety, and (4) ethnocentrism.

Our Neighbor, the Biologist, Charles Darwin

Darwin, as everyone knows, is cited as the one who gave
evolution widespread acceptance as an explanation for the
"how" of the diversity and complexity of life forms as these
became increasingly known in the 19tb century. Somewhat
lamely he seemed (under considerable "Christian" pressure
no doubt) to suggest a weak deistic explanation as to the "why" of all this: the Creator established laws that took a
rather vague course to eventuate in the highest and most
generalized form, mankind.

Again as every schoolboy knows, Darwin adopted competition among the species of life as one of his key concepts for the
process by which multiple forms evolved. Because he confessed that he had been greatly influenced by Thomas
Malthus (who saw populations outstripping food supply with
disasterous consequences), Darwin adopted a pessimistic scenario for mankind to explain the whole course of life upon the
earth. One need not elaborate the well-known and oversimplified phrase that has become every sophomore's explanation of Darwinianism: "survival of the fittest" (Herbert
Spencer's term, adopted by Darwin).

Darwinianism undercut the controversy regarding the
various human races' derivation from a common ancestor
(monogenism) or from multiple ancestry (polygenism), since
natural selection as a model comprehended both possibilities.
This controversy was linked with racialist theories of human
differences and with what became known as Social Darwinianism (better, Social Spencerianism). Such theories, however,
misuse Darwin's ideas and hold that different classes in
society have achieved their high or low status by natural
selection; the rich and powerful attain theirs by virtue of
advantageous variations and the poor and weak ("the miserable" of Malthus) by virtue of deleterious variations. Evidence
for these propositions lay not in discovering the relevant
variations but in the fact that the rich were rich and the poor
poor-an exercise in circular reasoning still widely used to
account for poverty today. Evangelical Christians tacitly or
otherwise employ such thinking to support their non-biblical
commitment to competition usually expressed in quantitative
superlatives.

With this postulate of competition among evangelical
Christians living in today's Babylon of humanistic materialism, White's thesis in The Sacred Cow is a logical consequence insofar as it goes. The tragedy is that the amazing
response to unethical appeals for funds, supported by pious
clich6s, is an indirect exploitation of Third and Fourth World
peoples who make the Sacred Cow in America possible. Even
our Christian schools, whether seminaries or colleges, are
committed to the assumption that education prepares for
more successful competition in any and all areas of life. The "service" concept degenerates into something quite different
than the explicit assertion of Jesus: "If anyone would come
after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and
follow me" (Luke 9:23).

As any person engaged in athletics in education will affirm,
competition does prepare one indeed for life, the life that
Darwin viewed in natural selection and survival of the
species. But I find it extremely difficult to reconcile this
competitive assumption with this Pauline conclusion:

Do nothing from selfishness or conceit, but in humility count others
better than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests,

but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves,
which you have in Christ Jesus, who
...
being found in human form he
humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross
(Philippians 4:3-5, 8 RSV).

Our Neighbor, the Sociologist, Karl Marx

Significantly, the competitive postulate in Darwin's natural
selection ideas lay back of parallel views proposed by Marx in
his militant opposition to religion as he observed it in Christendom. Any informed person knows that Marx rejected
religion as a means of alleviating or correcting social ills;
rather, he argued that religion is an "opiate" that numbed
mankind's intellect making it improbable that a supernatural
dimension bears upon therapies for human injustices. just as
we suggested with much oversimplification that our neighbor, Darwin, focused his thinking around competition among
species, we may also (with some reservations of course) single
out "conflict" as the core of Marxism.

Marxism states that social systems develop in accordance
with laws. Unlike animals, human beings can produce what
they need to survive (their means of subsistence). Through the
division of labor the amount that can be produced is greatly
increased, and a struggle develops over power to command
and channel the surplus. Generally, the group that can
monopolize access to strategic resources (the means of production) becomes the ruling class. Other classes are shaped by
their relationship to the means of production. These relations
of production are generalized throughout the society and give
it its characteristics. This is the "materialist conception of
history," which makes the nature of the productive system
central to an understanding of the political and cultural
aspects of the social system. Here are insights par excellence
into the Apostle John's Babylon!

Marx outlined a progression of socioeconomic stages that he
believed summarized the history of civilization: ancient,
feudalistic, and capitalistic. He contended that the dominant
cultural images of a society-especially religious institutions-reflect and support the economic system. In such
thinking, it is no accident that a consumption psychology is
found in all classes in a capitalist society. Self-image and
self-esteem are similarly linked to materialism; one may visit
in suburban homes of American evangelical Christians and
observe their life-styles to document this view.

Perhaps one major weakness in our neighbor's suggestions

George J. Jennings is the USA Executive Secretary of the Middle East Christian
otitreach, an International, Evangelical Missions Enterporise, headquartered at
Larnaca, Cyprus. After undergraduate and graduate work in psychocultural
anthropology at the University of Minnesota and Northwestern Evangelical
Seminary, he was ordained by, and served on the pastoral staff
of,
First Baptist
Church of Minneapolis. He began his teaching career at the University Of Minnesota (Minneapolis) and continued at Bethel, Northwestern, Wheaton, and
Geneva Colleges. His special research interests have been in psychological
anthropology and cultural dynamics, both in the Middle East and among
American Indians. His book,
A Missions Consultant Views Middle Eastern Culture
and Personality (1983)
is to be followed this autumn by
All Things, All Men, All
Means-To Save Some,
and
Hadith: A Composite Middle Eastern Village Under a
Missions Consultant's Gaze.

in his conflict model for understanding society is that they do
little to explain the viability and increased prosperity of the
industrially advanced nations after two World Wars. NeoMarxist thinking emphasizes the importance of vertical structuring of relationships between rich and poor nations. Third
and Fourth World nations are increasingly viewed as misdeveloped (rather than undeveloped) appendages of the economies of developed nations. In essence, this seems to mean that
there is an acceptable rationale for economic imperialism for rapacious prostitution underlying the Babylon doomed for
destruction in the Apostle John's scenario-that sustains what
evangelical Christians in Western culture assume to be the
.1
will of God."

Our Neighbor, the Psychologist, Sigmund Freud

While Darwin reacted to the Church's inepitude in
explaining struggles for life among species, including mankind, with the assumption of competition, and Marx advocated his conflict model for understanding social ills, Freud
epitomizes the consequences of both competition and conflict
upon the individual personality. The paradox, of course, in his
clinical and research findings is centered in and about the
pervasive anxiety found among the affluent peoples of his
day. In a certain sense, Freud's conclusions confirm the
biblical assertion that "man does not live by bread alone,"
especially when that bread is eaten in abundance at the
expense of impoverished and exploited others.

Finally we ought to note that Neighbor Marx offered a
moral code that serves as a judgmental stance for much of
Christianity as it affirmed economic prostitution in Western
industrialization. Other than devotion to the communist
cause, Marx sought for conscientious labor, concern for public
health, high sense of public duty, humane relations toward
others, mutual respect, honesty, truthfulness, moral purity,
modesty, family loyalty and concern, an uncompromising
attitude toward injustice (including dishonesty and opportunism), friendship and brotherhood, intolerance of national
and racial hatred, an uncompromising attitude to enemies of
peace and freedom, and fraternal solidarity among all
peoples everywhere.

It goes without saying that Marx must have been
influenced more than he perhaps would cared to have
admitted by biblical ethics despite his disavowal of religion.
Nevertheless in a quest for "classlessness" to emerge in social
evolution, his basic notion of conflict seems to reflect what he
saw institutionalized religion supporting in his affluent civilization; an affluence resting upon the exploitation of the
.1
masses" wherever they may be. Under the colonial umbrella, the rape associated with the conflict found evangelical
Christians unaware that they subscribe to the conflict model,
in practice if not in statement. And modern missions by
Christians developed programs and institutions seemingly
naive as to their indirect advocacy of the conflict assumption.

Among others, the Apostle James addresses himself to the
problem of conflict as did Marx in our Babylon. According to
James:

What causes wars, and what causes fightings among you? Is it not your
passions that are at war in your members? You desire and do not have; so
you kill. And you covet and cannot obtain; so you fight and wage war.
You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive,
because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions (James 4: 1-3
RSV).

So disillusioned did this atheist become in later life that be
held that religion is an illusion and as such could not enable
the disturbed person to cope with reality with effective
therapy. In
The Future
Of
an Illusion,
Freud became convinced that religion is a universal obsessional neurosis derived
in the fantasies of childhood and reinforced by religious
dogma. Why should one who had a devout Jewish father and
was reared in a profound Roman Catholic culture come to
this conclusion? Admittedly there is no simple or single
answer, but a contributing influence must have been a
combination of the competitive-conflict syndrome with racial
prejudice and a hypocritical Victorian morality that he
criticized in
Civilization and Its Discontents.
And what was
his civilization? It was that dominated by institutionalized
Christianity that served greatly as a gloss over what Pitirim
Sorokin has labeled as "sensate" society and culture.

Freud's theory of personality postulated the division of the
human psyche into three interacting areas: the id, the ego,
and the superego-the balance among which largely determines the health of the individual or lack of it. To him, the
conscious, preconscious (forgotten materials), and unconscious (repressed materials) were areas of the personality
complexly related to the basic triad of id, ego, and superego.
The pervasive energy at play in this complex structure is
summed in Freud's concept of libido that is either released or
inhibited at certain stages of personality development. Since
the generalized energy, the libido, operates in each of the
triad, the "healthy" personality is one wherein a balance
between the polarities of the id (instincts) and the superego
(culturally-conditioned "conscience") is executed by the
intermediation of the ego.

At considerable risk of misunderstanding and castigation
by colleagues who identify as I do with evangelical Christianity, I believe that Freud provides in his personality structure
something of what Jesus had in mind in the exchange with
one of his skeptics. in such an exchange in Dr. Luke's inspired
account, we read that eternal life may be achieved by the two
commandments; the first is that man is to "love the Lord your
God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all
your strength, and with all your mind.
.. " (Luke
10:27
RSV). Of course such instruction must be interpreted within
the phenomenological articulation compatible with New
Testament culture, not in terms of modern psychological
specifications or even theory. Nonetheless, it seems highly
suggestive that Luke had some idea about personality structure in which "mind,"
.1
soul," "heart," and "strength" corresponds roughly to Freud's "superego ... .. ego ... .. id," and
"libido," respectively. In a "healthy" person these structures
are balanced, whereas in a "pathological" person they are
not.

While Freud did not specify in extended treatment the
matter of competition and conflict, the neo-Freudians
emphasized that Western Christianity is foundational for
excessive value of these characteristics, as Weber anticipated
in citing Calvinism for "The Protestant Ethic" supported by
individualism. Hence, Erich Fromm writes about
The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness
and Karen Horney about
The Neurotic Personality of Our Time.
No doubt with
overstatement and oversimplification, Horney seems unduly
influenced by clinical practice that gives unbalanced data for
her extreme conclusion; yet extreme competition and conflict
that engulfs Western people-including evangelical Christians swayed by materialistic symbols for "self-actualization"
(Maslow)-is an "unfailing center of neurotic conflicts."

Further, scholars generally agree that contemporary industrial society, resting on exploitation of "misdeveloped"
peoples to accrue fabulous wealth, has elaborated the types of
conflict possible. Both on individual and group bases, Western peoples in the "Protestant Ethic" are continually in
competition for whatever may be desired. Institutionalized
Christianity in Western culture has been a bulwark for such
competition and conflict: consider contests between churches
and/or their church schools for attendance, enrollment,
finances, etc. it is pathetically amusing to see children
subjected to competition in "finding a Scriptural reference
first" somewhat reminiscent of what Jules Henry labeled for
American education as "the absurdity of learning" in his
Culture Against Man.
And what aspiring young instructor in
an evangelical school would be foolhardy or intrepid enough
to challenge a grading system that is the example par
excellence of competition among Christian students!

Our Neighbor, the "Animist," Vine Deloria, Jr.

Obviously in including Darwin, Marx, and Freud among
our neighbors in Babylon, we have included those who shared
completely the basic values and orientation, or worldview, of
Western Christendom and culture. They were not among the
"dispossessed" peoples or "have-nots" subject to prostitution
of resources and services by our Babylon, although their views
represented both influence and challenge by what they noted
in their world. They may have been controversial in Christian
thought but they are indeed neighbors by any standard that
perceives institutionalized Christianity in Western affluent
culture without ethnocentric lenses.

Now, however, we find it imperative to admit to our
neighborhood in Babylon one that has been traditionally
classified as "savage" or "pagan," although we have tried
strenuously to exclude him from our Babylon by sophisticated, discriminatory rationales, often supported by pious
cliches or scriptural texts removed from context. Born of
Sioux Indian parentage in the Standing Rock Reservation of
the Dakotas, Deloria reflects the continuing strength of
Indian religion by the centrality of the religious theme best
expressed in his
God Is Red
(and he is not talking about
Communism!). Deloria may be cited as one of the most
incisive and articulate spokesman for those raped by our
Babylonian politicians and economists. What he says is
echoed across the Third and Fourth worlds with increasing
din and clamor.

Though trained in a theological school, and descended
from a distinguished Sioux Indian family of scholars, clergymen, and warriors, Deloria rejects institutional Christianity as
a corruption of the true spirit of Christ. Instead, he suggests
that Indian religions, with their sense of place as opposed to
time, and their belief in a sympathetic involvement in nature
rather than a hostile adversary relationship to it, will attract
white as well as Indian adherents. Indian religious practices
will have to make accommodations to the scientific findings
of present, Deloria argues, but the Indian view of nature and
the supernatural remains valid. Indian religious leaders, like
Deloria, have long been uncomfortable about the institutional
face of Christianity while sympathetic to the life and teaching
of Christ.

To be more specific, Deloria concludes that the largest
difference between Indian religion and institutionalized
Christianity is in inter-personal relationships. Indian society
had a religion that taught respect for all members of the
society. He reminds us that Indians bad a religion that
produced a society in which there were no locks on doors, no
orphanages, no need for oaths, and no hungry people (the
hungry Indians came with the Indian Reservations!). Indian
religion taught that sharing one's goods with another human
being was the highest form of behavior. The Indians have
tenaciously held to this tradition of sharing their goods with
other people in spite of all attempts by churches, government
agencies, and schools to break them of the custom.

In Deloria's scathing views, institutionalized Christianity of
our Babylon came along and tried to substitute "giving" for
sharing. There was only one catch: giving meant giving to the
church, not to other people. Giving, says Deloria, in the
modern institutionalized Christian sense, is simply a method
of shearing the sheep, not of tending them.

He scornfully and with much satire cites two events, one
from "fundamentalist" Christianity and one from "liberal"
Christianity. First, he attends to the "Fundamentalists":

Perhaps the most important Christian event of our day was Explo 72, a
giant rally held in June 1972 at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, Texas, a city of
brotherly love. It was conceived and carried out by Bill Bright of the
Campus Crusade for Christ International, one of the many fundamentalist-oriented groups working on college campuses. More than 75,000
gospel-preaching, sure-enough young Christian came to Dallas to conduct a historic rally on behalf of fundamentalist Christianity.

Unlike the feeding of the five thousand, Explo 72 had a budget of 2.7
million dollars and charged participants a twenty-five-dollar entrance
fee, which was certainly an improvement over the New Testament way
of doing things. But for the entrance fee enough potato chips were served
to make a "one-ton potato chip," although apparently the Lord did not
do so, preferring to serve individual portions. The event was billed as a
religious Woodstock, and it was advertised on 800 billboards, 100,000
bumper stickers, and 5,000 T-shirts.

The climax to Explo 72 came when the 75,000 assembled young
Christians broke forth in a frenzy of religious devotion and began
chanting football cheers. Gimme a J, -JJJJJJay,- Gimme an E,
"EEEEE," Gimme an S, "ESSSSSS," Gimme a U, "UUUUUUU",
Gimme an S, "ESSSSS." Whatta ya got? "JESUS!"!" The Sermon on the
Mount must have seemed pale in comparison (God In Red, pp
. Z33Z34).

But Deloria insists that the confusion between Christianity
as institutionalized in American culture-in our Babylon-is
not simply a phenomenon of evangelical and right wing
Christianity. The liberal counterpart has also made its contribution to making institutionalized Christianity relevant to the
modern world.

The Lutheran Youth Congress meeting in San Diego in 1972 originated
the Jesus cheer later repeated at the Cotton Bowl. In 1970 the United
Church of Christ in Chicago held an unusual ordination ceremony which
indicated that it also had seen the light and was trying to make religion
relevant to American culture.

The ordained wore a multicolored vest with seventeen symbols representing "his concerns" sewn on it. Included were symbols of joy and
sorrow, a black fist, a Star of David, a peace symbol, a herald's trumpet,
and wheat seeds. Two leotarded dancers conducted a "moving prayer "against a background of shifting images projected on the walls of the
museum in which the service was held. Kent Schneider, the newly
ordained minister, "celebrated." He is director of the Chicago Center for
Contemporary Celebration and will teach others to celebrate. "Celebration, " he noted, "is an idea whose time has come." We'll drink to that.

Celebration may be the name of the game over on the left wing of the
Christian spectrum as football cheers seem to characterize the right wing.
The Reverend Harvey Cox of
Secular
City fame, who is the liberal guru
of the Boston area, decided in 1970 to combine all the elements of
religion into one massive presentation. Choosing a congruence of holy
days, Jewish Passover and Orthodox Easter, Cox gathered his disciples in
"The Boston Tea Party," a converted warehouse discotheque near
Fenway Park. A projector flashed images on the walls to represent
pictorially the agony of Vietnam, while participants wrote graffiti on the
walls of the building. A rock band called the Apocrypha played "I Can't
Get No Satisfaction," and at daybreak the crowd rushed into the streets,
chanting, "sun, sun, sun." Liberal Christianity had finally come of age.
Right on, as the liturgy of the day related.
(God Is Red, pp.
237-Z39).

A Contextualizational Reading of Scripture

As an evangelical Christian and a professional anthropologist with nearly four decades of intercultural research, I
concur with Charles Kraft of the School of World Mission at
Fuller Theological Seminary in his plea for an intercultural
evangelical theology. My reasoning is based upon a fundamental postulate: the church of Jesus Christ is multicultural,
and what is needed is to appreciate-better, to recognizethat our Babylonian affluence and prostitution are not congruent with a theology that is intercultural, or cross-cultural.
A theology for the whole church must be developed and this is
possible only through contextualization. By contextualization,
Kraft in his magnum opus to date, Christianity and Culture,
elaborates on a number of suggestions from the anthropological perspective that will contribute through contextualization
to an intercultural theology. This, in turn, will enable us in Babylon to better understand our rape of other peoples as we
have sought to explain through the eyes of four of our
neighbors.

Kraft's first general recommendation is that we must
distinguish between the data that we receive and work with
from throughout the world and the interpretation of that
data. As an anthropologist, I must be careful to distinguish
between the data and the theoretical model with which I
approach the data. I must also distinguish between the data
and my interpretation of that data. It is also important for
theologians to distinguish between the data and their interpretation of the data; after all, if one lives in Babylon, one has
to justify one's lifestyle (and it's possible to "prove" nearly
anything from Scripture!).

A second idea offered by Kraft is that Babylonian theologians must realize that while the biblical data are sacred and
infallible, the Babylonian theoretical models and interpretations are not. Not only are the theologians' models and
interpretations human, they are also bound by Babylonian
culture. Without realizing it, most theologians have been
using Western (usually Greek, for Augustine leaned upon
Plato, and Aquinas sought answers from Aristotle, to name
but two) philosophical models to interpret the biblical data.
We in Babylon need to realize that there are other valid
models for interpreting the Scriptures. For example, African
and Middle Eastern philosophical models do provide valuable
insights into understanding much of the Bible, especially the
Old Testament. Because African and Middle Eastern cultures
are "closer" to biblical Hebrew culture than our Western and
affluent Babylonain lifestyle, the insights provided by their
philosophical models must be incorporated into our theological processes. How else can we explain the discrepancy
between the Gospel as the "power unto salvation to everyone
that believes" and that over three-fourths of mankind, mostly
in the raped Third and Fourth Worlds, have not experienced
that "power" potential?

Another of Kraft's propositions is that anthropological
insight can aid theologians in the area of relevance. Theologians generally, and particularly if they live in the cloistered
quarters of Babylon, concern themselves with problems and
issues on a philosophical level while people live on a behavioral level (as the definition of who is one's neighbor provided
by Jesus in the "Good Samaritan" event). Much too much of
our theological concern is done in the language of metaphysical philosophy with frequent tautological explanation. Theologians need to use the language of the behavioral science in
terms of their approach to problems, their conclusions, and
their articulation.

A further suggestion by Kraf t is that for intercultural
understanding and the application of that knowledge there is
the need to distinguish between form and meaning, to be
gained mostly by anthropological efforts. This is the very
heart of a needed approach toward discerning cultural forms
and meanings; this is what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz
has most appropriately used to define culture as "a system of
meanings" shared by a society. We in Babylon need to realize
that cultural forms are important because of their meaning to
a particular people and not in and of themselves. Cultural forms derive their meanings from their cultural context and
can be fully understood only in that context. A cultural form
retains its meaning only in its own culture. Hence, the
meaning of conventional Christian forms of worship, not to
mention our interpretations of Jesus as a "culture hero" basic
to the "Protestant Ethic" for our Babylonian prostitution of
peoples outside our magnificent city, must be mystifying to
those victimized by our affluence!

If we are going to respond to the insights offered by our
four neighbors in Babylon, and if we are going to reach the
world for Jesus Christ, we must make the gospel relevant to
the people of the world. By this we do not mean that we alter
the "Good News," for we have only that summarized by the
Apostle Paul (I Corinthians 15:1-4). But, as James emphasizes, we need to discover what people's needs are and engage
in demonstrations as to how the gospel relates through
behavioral and social actions to their needs in their cultural
setting, in brief, to emphasize through contextualization,
concern and contribution.

through the eyes of those not living in our Babylon, for
poverty is the distinguishing lifestyle of at least three-fourths
of the world's people-that is, those not living in our luxurious
suburbia of a prostitutional Babylon. This means, to cite but a
sample or two from that ultimate source of our faith and
conduct:

I say this not as a command, but to prove by the earnestness of others that
your love also is genuine. For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus
Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that
by his poverty you might become rich (the Apostle Paul, 11 Corinthians
8:8-9 RSV).

And a scribe came up and said to him, "Teacher, I will follow you
wherever you go." And Jesus said to him, "Foxes have holes~ and the
birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his
head" (Matthew
8:19-20 RSV).

What does it profit, my brethern, if a man says he has faith but has not
works? Can his faith save him? If a brother or sister is ill-clad and in lack
of daily food, and one of you says to them, "Go in peace, be warmed and
filled," without giving them the things needed for the body, what does it
profit? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead (the Apostle James
2:14-17 RSV).

The Church of Jesus Christ is multicultural, and our Babylonian affluence
and prostitution are not congruent with a theology that is intercuftural or
cross-cultural. A theology for the whole Church must be developed.

My critique of our Babylonian neighborhood is not solitary,
for Waldron Scott pleads for "a new reading of the Bible" in
Bring Forth justice. His
impassioned call is to affluent
Babylonian (he doesn't use the term but has the same idea)
Christians. He notes, for instance, that the great and needed
emphasis on justification by faith in Luther's work was most
relevant in his cultural milieu that assumed the Church to be
a corporate fellowship intimately linked with the society and
culture of his day. Divorced from the present social condition
today, this doctrine, conditioned by developments in Western
(Babylonian) society and culture since the Renaissance,
becomes a rationale for an individualism and self-reliance
unknown in the New Testament. From such errors in parochial interpretation and monocultural perspective, we now
have in Babylon those who speak of "The Culture of Narcissism" and the "Cult of Self -worship" (Lasch and
Vitz).

The consequence attending this combination of affluence
and self-centered preoccupation in Babylonian culture is a
triad of loneliness, meaningless, and anxiety, according to
Scott. It may come as a surprise to us that these problems of
self are much less prevalent among the impoverished Middle
Eastern peasants or slum-dwellers in teeming Cairo. Their
problems are derived from rapacious injustice that fosters
poverty, disease, and malnutrition. When one is starving, the
meaning for life is to get relief from the hunger pangs (in the
case of "the Good Samaritan," there is a significant absence of
11
preaching" or "witnessing" in this act of compassion!). It is
so much easier to theologize with sophistication (and sterility)
when one's stomach is full!

Therefore, asserts Scott, we must learn to read Scripture

Conclusion

The question that I cannot elude by becoming acquainted
with my neighbors in Babylon, whether here at an evangelical institution of higher learning in professional status, or as a
member of an evangelical church, or as a responsible person
in evangelical missionary organizations is this: What do such
acquaintances have to do with me? After all, I have a rather
modest income and do not have any great clout in our
Babylon of rape and affluence. I am constantly reminded that
my fellow-Christians make great "sacrifice" as students in a
Christian school, or as faculty and administrators at the
school, or as parents who support the students at the school, to
say nothing of those members of the "body of Christ" at large.
Aren't we as Americans in general, and as evangelical Christians in particular, those people who surpass all others in
generosity and "sacrifice" stemming from compassion as we
learn of the plight of others wherever in the world? My
answer tends to center in and about the following statement,
and I leave my reader to identify with whomever is appropriate in his or her case:

And he (Jesus) sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the multitude putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large
sums. And a poor widow came, and put in two copper coins, which make
a penny. And he called his disciples to him and said to them, "Truly, I say
to you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are
contributing to the treasury. For they all contributed out of their
abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, her
whole living" (Mark
12:41-44 RSV).

REFERENCES
Darwin, Charles.
1962 (1859). On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural
Selection.
New York: The Macmillan Company.